Dan Kennedy's blog on media and politics • published by the Boston Phoenix from 2002 to 2005

Friday, January 31, 2003

Myths and images from a strange
mind. Nearly 100 percent of what I know about the literary critic
Leslie Fiedler comes from reading the obituaries in today's
New
York Times and
Boston
Globe. I love the
detail that he once attended a Bob Dylan concert with O.J. Simpson --
surely a better choice than, say, attending an O.J. film festival
with Mr. Z.

Last year, while doing research for
my book on dwarfism, I came across Fiedler's Freaks: Myths and
Images of the Secret Self (1978). I wasn't able to do much with
it. As Jacqueline Ann Clipsham, an artist and political activist
who's also a dwarf, has written, Freaks is "a horrendous book,
not about people with disabilities but unwittingly about the author's
own narcissism and prejudicial fears."

This morning, in looking over the
notes I'd taken on Freaks, I came across one passage I thought
was worth sharing. Mind you, I'm not endorsing it. But it is a pretty
good example of an unusual mind at work. Fielder is writing about the
transition of the dwarf community from a gaggle of Freaks (his word,
and his capitalization) to an organized interest group, from jesters,
sideshow performers, and even gods to agitators for normality and
equal rights. He continues:

Looking back over their
five thousand years of recorded history, it seems to me that the
Dwarfs are, in a real sense, the Jews of the Freaks: the most
favored, the most successful, the most conspicuous and articulate;
but by the same token, the most feared and reviled, not only in
gossip and the popular press, but in enduring works of art, the
Great Books and Great Paintings of the West. They have been, in
short, a "Chosen People," which is to say, a people with no choice
at all; but they have begun, like the children of Israel, to
choose at least to choose. How appropriate, then, that they, who
began their escape from oppression via the back doors of the great
courts of Europe and have prospered in show business in America,
take the lead now in organizing for mutual defense,
consciousness-raising, and social action.

If, like some Jews, some of them
long to disappear into the "normal" world around them, even this
seems to me finally fitting and proper.

Odd stuff. To me, at least, this
sort of thing sounds thought-provoking, but means little or
nothing when you hold it up to scrutiny.

Thursday, January 30, 2003

"Shock and Awe" and death and
revenge. Today's Phoenix includes a column I wrote on
the
media's one-dimensional reaction
to Monday's reports by UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed
ElBaradei. There's one point I want to expand on -- a report, which I
found on Dan
"Tom Tomorrow" Perkins's weblog,
that the Pentagon has already decided to open the war against Iraq by
bombing Baghdad into a pile of rubble, occupied by no one except the
dead.

According to the CBS News report
that Perkins cites (via a story in Australia's Sydney Morning
Herald), the strategy has been labeled "Shock and Awe." I found
this
description on a Department
of Defense website, ascribing it to Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. But what
the Pentagon has in mind goes way, way beyond what those military
thinkers ever could have imagined. The Herald piece continues:

... between 300 and 400
cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive
days. It would be more than twice the number of missiles launched
during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.

"There will not be a safe place
in Baghdad," a Pentagon official told America's CBS News after a
briefing on the plan. "The sheer size of this has never been seen
before, never been contemplated before."

The idea, according to the
Herald, is to break the Iraqi people "physically, emotionally
and psychologically." (The paper uses quotation marks around this
phrase, but the attribution is unclear.) This is sick, outrageous,
and -- more to the point -- completely counter to US
interests.

The battle plan is based
on a concept developed at the National Defense University. It's
called "Shock and Awe" and it focuses on the psychological
destruction of the enemy's will to fight rather than the physical
destruction of his military forces.

"We want them to quit. We want
them not to fight," says Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the
Shock and Awe concept which relies on large numbers of precision
guided weapons.

"So that you have this
simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima,
not taking days or weeks but in minutes," says Ullman.

Think about this: Ullman is
explicitly saying that the US is willing to kill vast numbers of
Iraqi civilians in order to terrify the Iraqi military into
surrendering. Am I twisting this? Is the real intent to destroy
buildings while sparing lives? Well, look again. It's Ullman who
makes the Hiroshima analogy. I assume he was choosing his words
carefully.

It is difficult for someone with no
background in military matters to speak out about such things, but
each of us has an obligation to think hard and not remain silent.
Remember, they're doing this in our name. I oppose George W. Bush's
obsession with invading Iraq. But let's face it, it's going to
happen. There are ways to do it that would enhance our international
reputation, bringing down Saddam -- one of the worst people on the
face of the earth -- and doing it with a minimal loss of civilian
lives. The Iraqi people would be liberated, sanctions would be
lifted, and rebuilding would commence. (And Saddam might blow up his
oil fields, launch missiles at Israel, and dispatch terror teams to
the US.)

Trouble is, the right way to
do it might involve the deaths of more American troops than would
"Shock and Awe." Thus it's a terrible argument that I am trying to
make: that it is worth the lives of some unknown number of US
soldiers in order to avoid a holocaust in Baghdad. What an offensive,
arrogant thing to say! To which I respond, if this war can't be
prevented, then we should at least do it in such a way that will
result in the fewest American casualties -- not four weeks from now,
but over the next 20 years.

The reaction of the Iraqi people,
and of the Arab world in general, will depend a lot on whether the US
behaves as a liberator, or as an imperialist power bent on wreaking
"Shock and Awe."

In his State of the Union message
this week, Bush spoke of the hypothetical threat of an Iraqi
terrorist team entering the US with a small quantity of weapons of
mass destruction, the sort of weapons that could take many more lives
than the attacks of 9/11.

Romney buys time. So
Governor Mitt Romney bought himself another month, announcing last
night that his cuts for the current fiscal year won't be nearly as
bad as what he had led us to believe a couple of weeks ago (gee, what
a surprise), and putting off until late February or early March his
proposal to reorganize state government. That gives him another few
weeks to figure out how he's going to explain that his reorg won't
accomplish much, and that he really is going to have to slash "core"
services, raise taxes, or both.

But give the governor a break.
There's no such thing as a bad day when it includes MDC commissioner
David Balfour's being told to hit the bricks. Even better, Romney
wants to do away with the MDC entirely. (Click here
for Globe coverage, and here
for the Herald's take.)

Meanwhile, the Globe's
Frank
Phillips today has a useful
analysis of how inaccessible Romney has proved to be, especially when
compared to his four immediate predecessors -- Democrat Michael
Dukakis and Republicans Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, and Jane Swift. To
update Harry Truman, Romney already knows he can't stand the heat, so
he's staying out of the kitchen.

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Seen but not spoken of. More
tax cuts for the rich? Well, what did you expect? War with Iraq?
Whatever. The real news in last night's State of the Union address
was in what President Bush didn't do. For the first time in
nearly a generation, the president eschewed the treacly practice of
introducing the guests who get invited to sit with the first lady.

Last year, in his
first State of the Union address,
Bush had no choice: the wounds of 9/11 were still raw. He paid
tribute to Shannon Spann, the widow of CIA agent Michael Spann, who
was killed during an attempted jail break in Afghanistan; the newly
installed Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, and his minister of women's
affairs; and the flight attendants who stopped would-be shoe-bomber
Richard Reid.

This time, though, his
guests were seen but not
acknowledged. And thus a cheap publicity stunt begun two decades ago
by Ronald Reagan, and continued by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton,
was finally brought to a close, if only for one year. George W. may
yet ruin the country, but at least he restored a bit of dignity to a
solemn occasion.

What was he thinking? I'm
still trying to wrap my brain around something that Syracuse
University television scholar Robert
Thompson told the Globe's
Mark Jurkowitz, who weighs in today with a piece on new 60
Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager. Noting that 60
Minutes' ratings have been falling during the last few years of
the Don Hewitt era, Thompson said, ''Once 24-hour cable television
kicked in, 60 Minutes couldn't stay in the same cultural
positioning it once had.''

Now what, exactly, is Thompson
referring to? The lamebrained idiocy of the Fox News Channel's
Hannity & Colmes? The tabloid trash of Connie Chung's show
on CNN? The breathless efforts of the well-meaning Phil Donahue as he
fails in his attempt to prove to MSNBC that he's still
relevant?

There are a few good shows on cable
news, but not many, and precisely zero with the deep reporting of
60 Minutes. Or perhaps Thompson was thinking of MSNBC
Investigates, with its hard-hitting stories on tattoos and --
gasp! -- the shocking things that are picked up by in-store security
cameras.

As Fager himself told Jurkowitz:
"It's amazing how much crap makes it on TV."

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

Farewell to David Shribman.
The Globe's soon-to-be-former Washington-bureau chief,
David
Shribman, has his last
weekly "National Perspective" column in today's edition. It's a
moving piece about his uncle, who was killed on a PT boat in World
War II, and the relevance of his heroism to the all-but-certain war
with Iraq. Whether you agree with Shribman's conclusion will depend,
in part, on where you stand on President Bush's aggressive foreign
policy:

At stake are not only the
freedoms that the nation was founded on and the freedoms that
generations of Americans have fought to add to our national
culture, but also, as the World War II generation used to put it
in an evocative shorthand, the right to boo the Dodgers. At stake
are all those things, plus -- and this is what makes our
home-front war different -- the right to go to a Dodgers game or
to the mall or to the airport in safety.

I don't buy Shribman's notion --
suggested but not quite explicitly stated -- that Bush's eagerness to
launch a pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein is the moral
equivalent of World War II. But his appreciation for his uncle's
sacrifice is beyond argument.

Shribman now assumes the reins as
executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and will
continue writing a weekly column. According to the Globe, that
column will appear on the Globe's op-ed page "periodically."
Well, gee. Shribman is one of a tiny handful of columnists ever to
win a Pulitzer Prize for the Globe, and he's got local roots
as well, having grown up on the North Shore. If the man's going to
write a weekly column, you'd think it would be a no-brainer for
Globe editorial-page editor Renée Loth to run 'em
all.

Backhanded compliment. An
odd column today from the
Herald's Wayne Woodlief,
who devotes half his space to an analysis of how Governor Mitt Romney
is handling the budget crisis. Woodlief praises Romney for his "fast
and stylish start," but what appears to impress Woodlief most is
Romney's ... disingenuousness:

Romney and his aides are
playing a great game of good-cop, bad-cop on some $500 million in
cuts the governor is set to make this week to meet an emergency
revenue shortfall in the state budget for the fiscal year that
ends in June.

In orchestrated leaks to the
press, aides revealed that Romney has decided against cuts in
basic education aid under Chapter 70 to some poorer schools (of
course, the state might have been sued on constitutional grounds
if they had been cut) -- and also rejected slashes in money for
veterans.

Yeah, great job, Mitt. Woodlief
might also have noted that Romney got elected, at least in part, by
being the only candidate for governor last year to claim that there
wouldn't be a budget crisis in the first place.

Who's a neocon? Regarding my
post yesterday on the
antitrust investigation of
the LA Weekly and the now-defunct New Times LA, reader
CS writes: "First Meyerson, and now you. Whatever else NT was, it was
NEVER -- by any stretch of the imagination -- neocon.
Jeez!"

I should have made it more explicit
that I was attributing that judgment to LA Weekly columnist
Harold Meyerson. As a side note, I am reliably told that Meyerson is,
indeed, still at the American Prospect as editor-at-large, and
that his position at the Weekly is strictly part-time. The
LA Times' description of Meyerson as the Weekly's
executive editor was wrong.

Monday, January 27, 2003

The politics of media antitrust
enforcement. The Justice Department's decision to
end
its antitrust probe of the
alt-weekly chains Village Voice Media and New Times Media -- and to
settle on the cheap -- raises some troubling questions.

On the one hand, the deal that the
two chains reached last fall would appear to be classic collusion.
Each agreed to shut down a weekly paper rather than continue to
compete. New Times closed New Times LA, a market long
dominated by the Voice-owned LA Weekly. In Cleveland, Voice
Media stopped publishing its Cleveland Free Times, ceding the
market to New Times's Cleveland Scene. Moreover, Voice Media
paid New Times a reported $8 million for its LA disappearing act; New
Times, in return, paid a much smaller sum to Voice Media for the
Cleveland deal.

On the other hand, you've got to
wonder what the motivation was for John Ashcroft's Justice Department
to get involved. As Richard Karpel, executive director of the
Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, told the NY Times'
David Carr, it is indeed "odd that the government decided it must
prevent two small newspapers from closing after it stood on the
sidelines for years as the AOL Time Warners of the world swallowed
entire industries."

I'm not about to start criticizing
any effort by regulators to do something, at long last, about media
consolidation. But as Tim Rutten reported in Saturday's
Los Angeles Times,
there are reasons to believe that Justice's unprecedented quick
action had as much to do with politics as it did with the economics
of antitrust law. The LA Weekly's respected political analyst,
Harold Meyerson, reports the details in
a column this week.

The key passage in Meyerson's piece
is his assertion that "according to people close to the case to whom
I've spoken, the government is concerned that the assisted suicide of
New Times in Los Angeles reflects a narrowing of political
perspectives in the city, and that it is the government's
responsibility to create more ideological space." This is, as
Meyerson observes, a breathtakingly broad view of antitrust law."
Both the late New Times LA and the LA Weekly are free
papers; the law is intended not to protect political viewpoints but,
rather, advertisers, who would presumably be hurt by the
monopolization of the alt-weekly market in a given
community.

If that sounds crass, consider the
absurdity of requiring publishers to keep putting out free
papers, against their will, in order to protect a certain political
viewpoint. Yet the Justice Department may have come perilously close
to doing just that, particularly in LA, one of the nation's leading
media capitals. Surely it's no coincidence that New Times took
a neoconservative stance, and that the LA Weekly is a
left-leaning paper. And surely it's no coincidence that -- as Carr
reports -- Voice Media, as a result of the settlement with Justice,
had to agree to help former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan launch
a new conservative weekly in Los Angeles later this year.

By the way, what's the deal with
Meyerson? It's 5:45 a.m. on the West Coast as I write this, so I'm
not going to call him up. But has his incredibly shrinking job with
the American Prospect shrunk still further? Meyerson
was hired away from LA in
June 2001 in order to become the executive editor of the
Prospect. Rutten's LA Times piece describes him as the
"executive editor" of the LA Weekly, the job he held before
moving to Washington. But the Weekly's online
masthead describes Meyerson
as the paper's "political editor," a position he could presumably
hold while continuing to work at the Prospect. And
the
Prospect's Meyerson bio
calls him the magazine's "editor-at-large," the position he assumed
last year because (a) it was just an incredibly wonderful opportunity
or (b) he had clashed one too many times with co-editor Robert
Kuttner.

Inquiring minds want to know: did
Rutten make a mistake, or has Meyerson packed up his bags and moved
back to LA?

Four months ago a friend
who had recently met with the president on other business reported
to me that in conversation the president had said that he has been
having some trouble sleeping, and that when he awakes in the
morning the first thing he often thinks is: I wonder if this is
the day Saddam will do it....

Which begs the question, what
does Mr. Bush know that he hasn't said about Saddam's intentions
and ability to strike America?

Of course, Noonan is prepared to
give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, and then some. What's
interesting, though, is that even a sycophant such as Noonan
acknowledges that Bush hasn't even begun to make a case for why war
is necessary. What seems not to have occurred to her is that perhaps
there isn't a reasonable case to make.

A strong critique of the
MCAS.Boston Herald political editor Joe Sciacca today
has a good column on what's
wrong with the MCAS,
arguing that high-stakes testing makes no sense in a time of deep
cuts in the education budget. And he offers this advice to Governor
Mitt Romney: "If the governor truly wants to do something bold, he
will revisit MCAS and ask, honestly, whether it is realistic to pump
resources into a single and expensive high-stakes test at the expense
of overall educational quality."

Saturday, January 25, 2003

Resistance is futile. A
little over a week ago I posted an item on a
software dilemma. After
years of a pretty much Microsoft-free existence, my book editor was
asking me to switch to Microsoft Word so that we could use the "Track
Changes" editing feature.

I did some experimenting to see
whether I could avoid such a calamity, but to no avail. His "Track
Changes" comments did not survive the arduous journey from Word to
AppleWorks when I translated his documents with MacLinkPlus. Another
option -- an inexpensive alternative called ThinkFree
Office, which is supposed
to be Microsoft-compatible -- was even worse. Even allowing for the
distinct possibility that I was doing something wrong, I could find
no sign that ThinkFree supported "Track Changes."

I received some e-mails from
readers, and they broke down into two camps. One side argued that,
though they sympathized with my anti-Microsoft stance (admittedly
somewhat tongue-in-cheek, since I do, after all, own a few shares of
Microsoft), MS Word was nevertheless a pretty cool program. The
other, more militant side suggested I check out open-source
alternatives.

Tempting as the militants' vision
may have been, I decided that the time had come, at long last, to get
with the program, so to speak. I managed to pick up a legal version
of MS Office 2001 for Macintosh on eBay for a little more than $200,
a huge savings over the $499 list price. I installed it yesterday,
and, well, here I am. I write Media Log with a
long-since-discontinued program called Claris Home Page, which is now
close to being the only non-Microsoft software I use. Word, Excel,
Entourage, Internet Explorer (which was already my browser of choice)
... I mean, what the hell. The only thing left to do is ditch my
PowerBook G3 and pick up a Wintel laptop. (Not going to
happen.)

I'm rattling on about this because,
to me, it demonstrates perhaps the key ingredient of Microsoft's
success, which is, well, its success. Illegal monopolistic behavior
aside, the most important reason for me to use Word is not that I've
fallen in love with it (it is, in fact, a notably unlovable program),
but that everyone else uses it. No longer will editors have to waste
time reformatting stuff I send them. My book editor and I can
exchange "Track Changes" comments to our hearts' content.

It may be true that Microsoft's
monopoly has stifled innovation. But when you need to get things
done, innovation is less important than compatibility. And Bill Gates
has done more than anyone to ensure compatibility by crushing the
competition, by any means necessary. It ain't pretty, but it
works.

We don't need no education.
Hey, Mitt: Go ahead and cancel every last penny of state aid that
goes to the Medford Public Schools. If
they won't take it seriously,
why should the taxpayers? And how would you like to be the parent of
a Medford student, having to scramble for child care at the last
minute because superintendent of schools Roy Belson decided it would
be a neat idea to take the day off? One last question: Why is Belson
still employed?

Friday, January 24, 2003

Who smeared Scott Ritter?
Good interview with former UN weapons inspector Scott
Ritter on the website of
WRGB-TV (Channel 6) in Albany, New York. (I found the link through
OpinionJournal.com's "Best
of the Web," which is
enjoying Ritter's torment.)

In the past few days we've learned
that, in June 2001, Ritter
was arrested at a Burger
King and apparently charged with attempting to arrange a sexual
encounter with an underage girl he'd met on the Internet. According
to Ritter, the charges were dropped and the record of the case was
sealed. But that didn't stop someone from leaking the information at
a particularly inopportune time.

Here are a couple of key exchanges
with WRGB's Darcy Wells:

Q: Do you think this was
an attempt to silence you?

A: Again, I don't want to get
into that. I think that's a question that maybe you journalists
should delve into more.

...

Q: Who do you think leaked this
information?

A: I don't know, but whoever did
should be held accountable. I mean, I'm held accountable to the
rule of law. I was called forward. I stood before a
judge.

There has still barely been a word
about this in the national media. But the fact remains that someone
leaked sealed court documents about a leading (if misleading) critic
of the White House's Iraq policy on the eve of a likely military
invasion. Is anyone in the media going to get to the bottom of
this?

It's a dirty job, but somebody's
got to do it. Wow. In today's New York Times,
William
F. Buckley Jr. defends
affirmative action for the children of rich alumni, but not for
African-Americans. On the same page, Times columnist Nicholas
Kristof defends the affirmative-action policy that got a mediocre
student named George
W. Bush into Phillips
Andover Academy, and wonders why Bush can't understand that others
deserve the same opportunity. Hey, Bill: Read Kristof.

Thursday, January 23, 2003

Silencing an antiwar voice.
For the past year or so, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has
claimed loudly and ceaselessly that Iraq had largely gotten rid of
its weapons of mass destruction before kicking out the inspectors in
1998. He hasn't been particularly effective. As the Phoenix's
Seth
Gitell has pointed out,
much of what Ritter now says contradicts his earlier statements, and
he has failed to articulate a convincing explanation for his
switch.

Richard Butler, who headed the
inspection team on which Ritter served and who emphatically does
not believe Iraq has disarmed, has been far more persuasive in
his joint television appearances with Ritter -- even as he asserts,
as he did on MSNBC's
Donahue last week,
that he agrees with Ritter that the United States has no right to
invade Iraq unilaterally.

Still, Ritter has been a visible
and articulate spokesman, as well as something of a rallying point
for those who oppose George W. Bush's apparent plan to launch a war
against Iraq. So it is curious, to say the least, to watch the latest
attempt to discredit him unfold.

Last night Ritter
appeared on CNN's NewsNight
not to talk about Iraq, but to answer questions about a very
different matter. It seems that, in June 2001, Ritter was arrested at
a Burger King near Albany, New York. I'm not sure why Ritter agreed
to go on CNN, since he resolutely refused to answer any questions
other than to say the charges had been dropped and the case has been
sealed. But, reportedly, Ritter was accused of seeking a rendezvous
with an underage girl whom he'd met on the Internet. If news reports
are to be believed, he was met not by a teenage girl, but by
undercover officers.

Ritter claimed he was barred from
discussing the matter, but the host, Aaron Brown, dismissed that.
Brown told Ritter that CNN had consulted legal authorities who
concluded that though the government was prohibited from talking
about a sealed case, Ritter, as the person who was arrested, was not.
But Ritter wouldn't budge. At one point Brown told Ritter:

I'm trying to give you an
opportunity, if you want to take it, to explain what happened. And
here's the point of that. And you know this is true. You are
radioactive until this is cleared up. Until people understand what
this is about, no one is going to talk to you about the things
that you feel passionately about.

Ritter disagree, replying that "the
bottom line is, the rule of law must apply here and we must never
lose sight of that. I think you hit on something. I was a credible
voice. I am a credible voice. And I will be a credible voice in
regards to issues pertaining to Iraq." Unfortuntely for Ritter,
that's probably wishful thinking.

For days, now, Ritter's
year-and-a-half-old arrest has been a cause célèbre
among the prowar right. The right-wing website FreeRepublic.com has
been all over this, passing along lurid
details from local news
reports. Ritter's troubles have been the subject of much clucking and
chuckling on Rush
Limbaugh's radio show as
well.

I hold no brief for Ritter. But the
fact that sealed police records regarding one of the country's most
prominent critics of Bush's policy in Iraq would be leaked -- days or
weeks before war may begin -- is absolutely chilling. Rather than
snickering at the hapless Ritter, the media could perform a far
greater public service by finding out who was behind this sickening
attempt to smear a White House foe.

But Easterbrook's essay takes on a
life of its own, from original sin (Richard Nixon's decision to
exempt Jeeps from environmental regulations; it always comes back to
Nixon, doesn't it?); to Arnold Schwarzenegger's role in making the
Humvee a commercial success ("The Hummer screams to the world the
words that stand as one of Schwarzenegger's signature achievements as
an actor: 'Fuck you, asshole!' Maybe this class of vehicles should be
called FUVs."); to Senate majority leader Bill Frist's heroic,
unsuccessful attempt to save the lives of two children in an
SUV-rollover accident ("Will Frist become an advocate of SUV reform,
or will he return to Washington and join his colleagues in the next
round of cover-ups and exemptions?").

Weirdly, the person who may be
damaged the most by Easterbrook's piece is Bradsher, even though his
book is described as "dazzling," in the tradition of Ralph Nader's
Unsafe at Any Speed and Ida Tarbell's The History of
Standard Oil. That's because the review clocks in at just shy of
10,000 words. Having read Easterbrook's remarkably comprehensive
overview of the sordid history of the SUV, I can't imagine needing to
know more.

On the other hand, High and
Mighty has been on bookshelves since last fall. Maybe Easterbrook
will draw renewed attention to it.

Fenway's final years.Herald columnist Cosmo Macero is right: it's time to start
thinking about moving
the Red Sox to the South
Boston Waterfront. At least that way there will be 81 days a year
when people can admire the empty convention center.

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Even Lily Tomlin would gag.
The danger in trying to say anything nice about the Bush White House
was once nicely summarized by the political philosopher
Lily
Tomlin: "No matter how
cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." Yesterday I posted an
item
about the happy irony of George W. Bush's top two foreign-policy
aides, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, who are both
African-American, disagreeing over affirmative action.

Within hours I heard from reader
MG, who pointed me to a truly disheartening item that had appeared
last week in TNR &c., the New Republic's political weblog.
Remember that Washington Post story reporting that Rice had
taken a lead role in shaping Bush's anti-affirmative-action decision?
&c. recounts a Post follow-up reporting that the White
House had dragged Rice's name into it, apparently
without her permission or even her
knowledge, in order to give
themselves political cover (scroll down; don't read this on a full
stomach).

Rice and Powell's disagreement
seems legitimate, but this kind of sleazy maneuvering isn't.

Monday, January 20, 2003

MLK Day musings. It's a
holiday, a lot of people aren't working, so no heavy commentary
today. Not to be a Pollyanna, but there's something to be said about
celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at a moment when the
top two foreign-policy aides to a Republican president are both
African-Americans, and they
disagree with each other
over the president's policy on affirmative action. Of course, I
happen to think Colin Powell is right and Condoleezza Rice is
wrong.

Speaking truth to Mitt.
Economist Ed Moscovitch has a terrific op-ed piece in today's
Herald on Governor Mitt Romney's campaign to slash $200
million in local aid. Unfortunately, it's not yet on the
Herald's website, but Moscovitch makes two main points: (1)
Romney, in refusing to consider a tax hike, is not telling the truth
about how much money even a modest increase would bring in. Simply
raising the income tax to 5.9 percent as of March 1 would bring in
$200 million this fiscal year, thus canceling the need for local-aid
cuts, Moscovitch writes, contradicting Romney's assertion that a tax
cut this year would come too late to make a difference. (2) Romney's
plan to cut local aid equally and across the board -- supported by
the House but opposed by the Senate -- will have a disproportionate
effect on poor urban areas. "A 15 percent cut across the board would
cost Worcester $192 per person, but Weston only $57," Moscovitch
writes. "This is fair?"

Safire on media
consolidation. Excellent commentary today by the New York
Times' William
Safire on the dangers of
corporate media consolidation. Safire says nothing particularly
original or startling, but it's important that the powers-that-be
understand this isn't just a liberal issue, and that conservatives
can get riled up about it as well. Thanks to Jay Fitzgerald for
giving me a nudge on this.

Saturday, January 18, 2003

Sex and the jealous
columnist. Bob Somerby's Daily Howler has a hilarious, dead-on
deconstruction of Brian
McGrory's column on John Kerry
that appeared in last Tuesday's Globe. Writes
Somerby: "Baby Boy Brian is
very upset because John scored some chicks in a bar." Not to
be missed.

Friday, January 17, 2003

It's Bill Gates's planet. The
rest of us are just visiting. For many years now, I've been able
to lead a digital life pretty much free of Microsoft's bloated,
expensive products. I use a translation program called MacLinkPlus so
that my MS Word-using editors can read my AppleWorks-generated files,
and though the solution isn't perfect, it's been good
enough.

Now, though, I'm dealing with an
editor who wants me to be able to take advantage of Microsoft Word's
"Track Changes" function. I've never seen it, never mind used it, but
apparently it will allow him to make comments and changes on my files
in one color, and for me to respond in yet another color. Actually,
it sounds pretty cool. But no matter how we've tried to translate
each other's files, it comes up in black and white on my
screen.

The point is that the single
biggest value of having a standard is that -- well, it's a standard.
Much as I prefer AppleWorks, as long as 95 percent of the universe is
using Word, my recalcitrance makes life more difficult both for my
editors and myself. I probably can't hold out forever. And thus does
Bill Gates chalk up another small victory.

Later today I'm going to try a free
trial version of something called ThinkFree
Office. It's supposed to be
100 percent file-compatible with Microsoft Office. Since this is
something other Mac users would be interested in, I'll post a
follow-up describing the results.

Right-wing bias at the New
York Times? Al Giordano has posted a fascinating inside look
at the
Times' coverage of the crisis in
Venezuela. The article, on
Giordano's NarcoNews.com website, reports that Caracas correspondent
Francisco Toro has resigned because of his ties to the oligarchs who
are attempting to overthrow Venezuela's democratically elected
president, Hugo Chávez. And though the Times certainly
was right to accept Toro's resignation, Giordano recounts a long list
of incidents in which the Times has casts its editorial lot
with the right-wing opposition.

Thursday, January 16, 2003

That's how you survive
what he's survived. That's how you move forward, one step after
another, even though your name is Edward Moore Kennedy. You work,
always, as though your name were Edward Moore. If she had lived,
Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work
as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her
in her old age.

Brutally vicious, yes; unfair, no.
I certainly didn't think there was any mistaking Pierce's intent. And
it was confirmed for me last Thursday, when James Taranto, in his
"Best
of the Web" column on
OpinionJournal.com, wrote, "Charles Pierce must really hate Ted
Kennedy," and described the excerpt above as a "paragraph of pure
poison." Indeed, a letter published in the Globe Magazine last
Sunday described Pierce's piece as "truth, even though it is a savage
attack that strikes too close for comfort."

But it appears that not everyone
got it. Last Saturday, former Globe columnist John
Ellis ran just the last two
sentences of the poison paragraph on his weblog under the heading
"Only At The Globe" -- the implication being, I guess, that Ellis
thought Pierce was an addle-brained bleeding-heart who believed
Kennedy's lifetime of liberal legislating had wiped the slate clean
with regard to his role in Kopechne's death.

On Monday, Ellis acknowledged that
some of his readers had taken him to task for failing
to get it, and he ran a
lengthy e-mail from a friend of Pierce's. The next day,
Jay
Fitzgerald weighed in with
a long post on the affair, and came down on Pierce's side -- that is,
that the Kopechne reference was intended as harsh ironic criticism,
not as expiation. For good measure, Fitzgerald included an e-mail
from Ellis himself, who said he regarded Pierce's bit as "border-line
obscene" and "a spurious line of reasoning." Hmm. Well, okay, but
that's certainly not what I took away from the line "Only At The
Globe."

Yet Ellis's misreading -- if that's
what it was -- was minor compared to that of Mark Steyn, who wrote a
column about Pierce's piece on Monday in Canada's National
Post, which was passed on to me by a reader. Steyn quotes the
same Kopechne excerpt and then adds:

... Mr. Pierce's point is
a simple one: Sure, 34 years ago, Teddy fished himself out of the
briny, staggered away and somehow neglected to inform the
authorities until the following morning that he'd left some gal
down there. But, if he was too tired to do anything for her back
then, he's been "tireless" on her behalf ever since....

But among the orthodox left the
Clymer/Pierce view is the standard line: You can't make an
omelette without breaking chicks. This is subtly different from
arguing that a man's personal failings are outweighed by his
public successes. Rather, they're saying that a man's personal
flaws are trumped by his ideological purity, regardless of whether
or not it works. I doubt whether a 62-year-old Mary Jo would
regard Senator Kennedy as "bringing comfort" to her old
age.

(The Clymer reference is to New
York Times reporter Adam Clymer's biography of Kennedy from
several years back, once labeled by our only president as "a
major-league asshole.")

Steyn not only doesn't get it, he
twists Pierce's meaning beyond all possible recognition, making
explicit what Ellis had seemed to suggest implicitly. Taken within
context, Pierce is clearly, sneeringly saying that Kennedy's many
small accomplishments over the years can never undo his
reprehensible behavior at Chappaquiddick. Steyn, by contrast, asserts
that Pierce gives Kennedy a free pass. I wonder whether he even read
Pierce's entire article. Steyn is so sloppy that in his second
sentence he describes Pierce's piece as "a 10,000-word profile."
It is, in fact, about 8700 words. Not a big deal, but why say it if
you can't be bothered to get it right?

I sent Pierce an e-mail yesterday
asking him to comment. Here's his reply:

As to Ellis, whom I assume
is the Bush cousin whose
WSJ piece you
mentioned on Wednesday, well, we knew from Fox News that he
couldn't count honestly. Now we know he can't read honestly,
either. [Media Log aside: Whoa!] As for young Mr. Steyn --
what can I say? If he was Navajo, I'd blame it on the peyote. My
respect for Mr. Taranto grows by the hour.

Pierce adds that he may write about
this tomorrow when he fills in for Eric Alterman on his
Altercation
blog. Should be interesting.

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

Oh, yes he did. Some curious
backtracking today about the investigation into Pete Townshend's
visits to child-pornography websites. (He admits that it's true, so
no "alleged.") Today's
New York Times
update includes this weasel paragraph:

Mr. Townshend, who says he
suspects he was abused as a child, said he had viewed child
pornography on the Internet -- but had not downloaded it -- while
researching his autobiography and as part of his longtime campaign
against child sexual abuse.

The Boston
Globe ran a correction
on page A2, blaming it all on the Associated Press and adding:
"Townshend said only that he had used his credit card to enter the
site and told a London newspaper he had never downloaded child
pornography." And, yes, the
AP has "corrected" its
original report.

Geez. Don't these people know
anything?

If Townshend "viewed child
pornography on the Internet," as the Times reports, then he
downloaded it. Every page you visit on the Web downloads to your
computer. When the little "E" or "N" is moving in the upper right
corner of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, it's telling you
that the page you've requested is in the process of being -- yes --
downloaded.

Townsend apparently means that he
didn't save any of the images he'd downloaded to his hard drive, but
that's a distinction without a difference. As his lawyer has no doubt
explained to him by now, the images he admits to having looked at may
actually be on his hard drive, whether he realizes it or not.
Unfortunately for Townshend, his computer is currently in the hands
of the authorities.

If the editors at the AP, the
Times, and the Globe had an ounce of understanding
about the way the Internet works, they would have realized that no
correction or clarification was needed.

John Ellis's Case history.
Former Globe columnist John
Ellis has a terrific piece
on the post-Steve Case future of AOL Time Warner that appears on the
editorial page of today's Wall Street Journal. Paul Gigot must
agree, since it's been left off the free OpinionJournal.com site and
is available to paid subscribers only. (In case you do
subscribe, here's
the link.) Here's my
favorite part:

The notion that the
company can now coalesce around a common purpose is laughable.
Time Warner has always been about egomaniacs running fiefdoms and
raiding each other's turf. Division heads collaborate only to kill
off rivals. They collaborated to kill off former COO Robert
Pittman and Chairman Case. Now they'll start on each other.

Baby maybe, doggie
definitely. One way to tell whether or not a couple ought to be
allowed to adopt a child is if they would choose a dog over a baby.
Maybe the state has no right to tell prospective parents that they
can't have a German shepherd in the house. But it is one way
to sort out the ones who are serious from the ones who
aren't.

Tuesday, January 14, 2003

BU J-school prof: Edit pages are
partisan. Get over it. The Globe's Mark
Jurkowitz today has an
overview on the controversy at the Herald over the hiring of
longtime Republican politico Virginia
Buckingham as deputy
editorial-page editor. The editor of CommonWealth magazine,
Bob Keough, gets off the best quote, telling Jurkowitz, "If she were
going to get a desk in the newsrooom, that would be a problem. I'm
not sure it raises that many red flags to be on the editorial page."
But Buckingham made me wince in saying, "My dream has always been to
pursue a writing career," which only highlights the yawning gap
between her complete lack of experience and the plum job she's been
handed.

Meanwhile, Boston University
journalism professor Mike Berlin can't understand what all the fuss
is about. He sent a long and thoughtful e-mail to Media Log, which
appears below:

I heard about the
Buckingham conflict at the Herald on "Beat the Press," and
found myself quite puzzled about why reporters took it upon
themselves to voice a protest, and what conflicts of interest
there could possibly be for a person whose job it is to reflect
the views of the publisher/owner and commit those views to
print.

When your boss writes about
expanding Fenway Park to swallow the Phoenix office, there
are conflicts of interest inherent in his viewpoint. But as the
owner he is entitled to express it in an editorial or have an
editorial writer express it for him, and since they are his views,
it doesn't much matter who the writer may be.

If he were a former state
commissioner with some link to a party or a faction, one would
expect him to reflect the viewpoint of that party or faction, very
much the way that Herald publisher Pat Purcell is linked to
various people, issues and ideology and is expected to reflect
that viewpoint on the editorial page of the Herald, or
through the people he chooses to hire to do the writing for him.
If they can't write very well, then that's his problem, and
perhaps he will get an editor to look over their copy before it
runs, or perhaps he won't and people will think less of his views
because they are not well expressed.

Readers should be aware that the
editorial page reflects the views of the owner. If they are not
aware, that is their lookout, not his. He already has an ideologue
of his choosing as the editor of the page, and columnists who
reflect the views he wishes to have expressed. It should be clear
where the Herald stands. If Purcell is generous enough to
listen to other voices before expressing the paper's views, that
may be a bonus, but no one should expect it.

But you want people on the edit
page who have strong opinions and advocate causes, not people who
are neutral, cautious and dull, and write editorials that waffle
and don't come down on one side or another.

But why should this matter to
the reporters? Their concern is to maintain the wall between news
pages and editorial pages; ensure that readers are aware of the
difference; and fight to prevent the editorial-page views from
slopping into their own copy and their editors' news choices. That
is what they should be fighting for. When I worked at Dolly
Schiff's New York Post, Paul Sann, the executive edtior,
reveled in running stories that made Dolly's viewpoints, and thus
Jimmy Wechsler's editorials, look silly. It was his way of showing
the city that the news/editorial wall was impregnable.

The bad rap on Rupert Murdoch
and his style of journalism is not that he hired
frothers-at-the-mouth to run his edit page and sound like
ideologues. That was well within the American tradition. The
problem with his journalism was that he didn't let the news pages
run on the basis of journalistic choices, but forced out stuff
that he didn't like editorially (stories about environmental
threats, or stories that made Jimmy Carter look good) and forced
in stories that were politicized. And in a modified form, that
remains true today of both Boston newspapers; readers do think
that they pull punches on news stories to match editorial-page
views.

By protesting the choice of an
edit writer, Herald reporters are suggesting to the public
that what is printed there does in fact tarnish the news coverage.
They are admitting a link that they should be rejecting and
denying.

I speak as someone who wrote
edits as a summer replacement both under Dolly and under Rupert,
when he attended the weekly editorial meeting personally and had
long arguments with Jimmy Wechsler about abortion, afffirmative
action and other issues (he was against capital punishment) and
then went back to my job as a reporter, fighting as best I could
to get stuff into the paper that the boss wouldn't like, and to
keep stuff out of the paper that was propaganda for the boss's pet
projects.

Buckingham is simply a reminder
that all editorial pages are appropriately opinionated, slanted,
biased, and reflect the viewpoint of the owner (or the owner's
willingness to allow a range of viewpoints to be expressed),
rather than fair and balanced and open to all viewpoints, as the
news pages should be.

Media Log goes policy wonk!
People don't want smaller government and lower taxes. They want
bigger government and lower taxes. They want it all, and they
want it right now. Politicians can choose between trying to explain
that, you know, stuff costs money, or they can pander. The latter is
a sure route to success. Mitt Romney last year pandered his way right
into the corner office.

During the campaign, Romney said he
could close the state's gaping budget deficit by putting his
world-class management skills to work, by slashing the bureaucracy
and eliminating duplication while not raising taxes and not cutting
"essential" services. (Essential services are things that you need.
Non-essential services are things that somebody else needs.) Of
course he couldn't, and he began backtracking the moment he was
elected.

Now he wants the legislature to
give him the authority to cut local aid to the bone, which will force
schools to close early and police officers and firefighters to be
laid off. (Click here
for today's Globe coverage, and here
for today's Herald coverage.)

Since the legislators lack both
guts and brains, they're almost certain to go along, notwithstanding
their plaintive cry to Romney to explain what he's got in mind. But
they shouldn't. Here's what they ought to do:

Borrow the $600 million needed
to get through the rest of the fiscal year without any further
cuts.

Reform the state tax system.
That means going ahead with the voter-approved mandate to return
the state income tax to five percent, but rethinking and possibly
repealing the $3 billion to $4 billion in tax breaks for
corporations and the wealthy that were passed during the 1990s.
That's where the money is. Here's a good place to start:
reversing the special-interest tax break that Fidelity got in the
mid-'90s. Wonder what former Fidelity executive Robert Pozen --
currently receiving all
kinds of praise for
serving in the Romney administration without pay -- would think
about that?

Go after the hackerama head-on.
Today's Herald reports that MDC commissioner
David
Balfour continues to run
amok, and that virtually the first act of Tim
for Treasurer was to
reward one of Tom Finneran's coat-holders with the six-figure job
of "running" the Lottery. Ugh.

Monday, January 13, 2003

Give Buckingham a chance.
She has no
obvious qualifications, as
I wrote last month. Her conflicts
of interest make one's head
spin, as Northeastern University School of Journalism director Steve
Burgard argues. Certain elements of the newsroom are skeptical, to
put
it mildly (third item). But
the Herald today, as expected, announced
that former Massport director and Republican political operative
Virginia Buckingham will be the paper's new deputy editorial-page
editor.

So let me be counterintuitive for a
moment. Buckingham is young, smart, and hardworking. She's a moderate
conservative, presumably live-and-let-live on cultural issues. One
fear is that she'll serve as a mole -- a back channel from the
Herald to her Republican friends. But is that really fair?
After 9/11, Buckingham was pretty much hung out to dry by everyone.
The Weld-Cellucci-Swift crowd (though not Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci
themselves) piled on. As for the new crowd, Mitt Romney has
surrounded himself with aides to former state treasurer Joe Malone,
against whom Buckingham fought as a top political aide to Cellucci in
1998.

In other words, there's every
reason to believe that Buckingham is finished with politics and wants
to do a good job at the Herald. She deserves a chance to prove
it.

Steve Case's amazing
swindle. Steve Case's epitaph is that bamboozling Time Warner --
the largest media company in the world -- was an insufficient
qualification for running it. Case
quit as chairman of AOL
Time Warner last night because the company's stock price has tanked
since Case's AOL acquired Time Warner two years ago.

But as James Surowiecki observed in
the New Yorker a few months ago (no link; I'm going by memory
here, so bear with me), Case actually did spectacularly well by
his shareholders -- that is, the folks who held hyperinflated
AOL stock before the merger. AOL Time Warner's stock at this moment
is $14.88, which is a lot lower than the $56 or so that it commanded
at the time of the merger. But if Case hadn't gone out and bought a
real company with his pile of AOL funny money, his crappy and
outmoded online service would probably be trading for less than $5
right now.

Of course, the real reason I'm
writing this item is so that I can recycle a bit from
Tina
Brown's debut column last
fall in the Times of London, in which she quoted Time
magazine art critic Robert Hughes's priceless letter to former Time
Warner chairman Gerald Levin, the man who, more than anyone, got
swindled by Case. Hughes's letter begins:

How can I convey to you
the disgust which your name awakens in me? The merger with Warner
was a catastrophe. But the hitherto unimagined stupidity, the
blind arrogance of your deal with Case simply beggars description.

How can you face yourself
knowing how much history, value and savings you have thrown away
on your mad, ignorant attempt to merge with a wretched dial-up
ISP? . . .

I don't know what advice you
have to offer, but I have some for you. Buy some rope, go out the
back, find a tree and hang yourself. If you had any honour you
would.

Den Beste's depressing conclusion:
things will continue to get worse and worse for Apple, because its
closed architecture and low volume have locked it into an endless
cycle of higher and higher software-development costs relative to its
Wintel cousins. And because of bad decisions Apple has made over the
years, there's really nothing Steve Jobs and company can do to
reverse course.

Friday, January 10, 2003

Jurkowitz on McDonough. The
Phoenix website has posted a
classic profile of Will McDonough
that Mark Jurkowitz (then of the Phoenix, now of the
Globe) wrote in January 1994. The headline: "Jurassic Jock."
And I think it's the single best piece anyone has ever written about
the two-fisted sportswriting legend.

Will McDonough's legacy. He
was a crank. He was a legend. He was both. Globe sports
columnist Will McDonough died last night at the age of 67, depriving
Boston of one of its most cantankerous and original voices. The news
is just starting to break, so there's not much out there yet other
than this
Associated Press report. He
died with his boots on, watching ESPN's
SportsCenter.

I would imagine the place to be for
McDonough fans today is Mike Barnicle's 10 a.m.-to-noon show on
WTKK-FM (96.9 FM), where McDonough was a
regular Friday guest. A
couple of years ago McDonough officially retired from the
Globe, although he continued writing his column on a freelance
basis. Talk about having your cake and eating it too: McDonough was
able to work out a
sweet deal, continuing to
draw a paycheck from the Globe while taking potshots at the
Globe's young, liberal newsroom during his stints on the
air.

As recently as last week
McDonough
swung hard at Red Sox
president Larry Lucchino, who's embroiled in a feud with Yankees
owner George Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner appears to hate Lucchino so
much that he's willing to spend even more of his money than usual
(not an easy trick) in order to keep the Red Sox well out of
contention. McDonough endorsed Steinbrenner's characterization of
Lucchino as a "chameleon," adding:

Lucchino has a face for
all occasions, but, unfortunately, very little knowledge of
baseball. He was slotted into the Red Sox job by his good friend,
Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, who wanted to ensure that
he would have Boston's vote in his pocket whenever he needed
it.

One of the raps on McDonough was
that he talked only to owners and to the biggest of bigshots, such as
Parcells and Red Auerbach. But the flip side was that, more often
than not, they talked only to him, giving him a steady stream of
exclusives. In an era of bland, faceless journalism, McDonough
offered personality and vitriol, making him one of the most
consistently readable columnists in the Globe.

Here's an interview McDonough did a
couple of years ago with Teen
Ink, a website for
teenagers.

Thursday, January 09, 2003

J. Bo strikes back on his
baby-eating story. The Weekly Standard's J.
Bottum today responds to
what by his own account were numerous critics -- including Media Log
-- who told him he'd fallen for an urban legend or two in his heinous
post last Friday on alleged baby-eating in China. Here's
what I wrote about it.

Bottum's long response is worth
reading in its entirety, but first, a few observations.

In essense, Bottum challenges
his critics to prove that it didn't happen. Hasn't he ever
heard the tired-but-true saw that you can't prove a negative?
There really is no documentary evidence that it did happen,
and plenty of reason to be skeptical.

Bottum asserts that the very
fact that these stories are circulating -- and that Chinese performance
artist Zhu Yu claims to have eaten a stillborn baby -- says
something important about the culture, regardless of whether these
stories are actually true. His conclusion: "The picture of a
culture of death is being created in front of us. Don't look at
the individual pieces as they are held up, one by one. Look at the
puzzle that's being filled in." Actually, I suspect he could have
written a pretty good column about what it means that such
apparently bogus stories are circulating. But that's not what he
wrote last Friday. Is it really necessary to say that the truth
matters?

The headline on the e-mail
version of my piece -- though not the Web version -- referred to
Bottum's original post as a "blood libel." Bottum notes that the
About.com urban-legends site that I referred to uses the phrase
"blood libel," and then casually adds that "this is where the
Boston Phoenix lifted the 'blood libel' bit."
Lifted? Is Bottum always this careless with language? Hey, J. Bo,
look at my first post again. I not only linked to the About.com
piece, but I also quoted from it, including the "blood libel" bit.
Since when did quoting become "lifting"?

It's a man's world. You
might read Joan
Vennochi's column in
today's Globe -- in which she argues that Massachusetts is a
particularly inhospitable environment for women politicians -- and
say, "Oh, come on."

But then you turn to the City &
Region section and find this lose-your-breakfast
piece by Stephanie Ebbert
on how male legislators (including House Speaker Tom Finneran) are
making Father Knows Best-style quips about having to check
with the little woman before deciding whether to take a pay
raise.

Next you pick up the Herald,
and are told in a front-page report by David Guarino that
you're
supposed to be outraged
that Jane Swift continued to make gubernatorial appointments until
she was no longer governor. (Okay, it sounds like she made a couple
of bad appointments. Like that's never happened
before.)

And you have to conclude that
Vennochi is right when she says that "Massachusetts is still very
much an Irish-American, Italian-American, patriarchal, Catholic
state. Culturally and politically, man is king here -- to himself and
to many women."

Wednesday, January 08, 2003

Apple's new war on
Microsoft. Since Steve Jobs's return to Apple in the late 1990s,
the company he co-founded has survived -- even prospered -- under
sort of a Pax Microsoftia. Bill Gates invested some of Microsoft's
spare change in Apple, and Apple made Microsoft's Internet Explorer
the default browser on its Macintoshes.

Far more important, Apple did
everything it could to ensure the success of Microsoft Office, the
Mac version of which costs an obscene $499, or a considerably more
reasonable $199 for new-Mac buyers. Apple's competing product,
AppleWorks, was included free of charge only on Apple's
consumer-market Macs; buyers of Macs aimed at professionals would
have to shell out an additional $79. Moreover, there is no easy,
seamless way of sharing files between the AppleWorks and Office
worlds, as my irritated editors would be the first to tell
you.

Now Jobs has apparently decided to
go to war against Microsoft. Yesterday's
new-product announcements,
at MacWorld in San Francisco, are just the latest sign that David
wants to compete head-to-head with Goliath. Last year, for instance,
Apple unveiled its quirky and effective "Switch"
ads in an attempt to get
Windows users to come over to Apple. Of course, Apple has
always depended on people preferring the Mac operating system
to Windows, but there is a snarky "Windows sucks" tone to the
"Switch" ads that belie the two companies' supposed
alliance.

Also, the Mac enthusiast site Think
Secret reported in October that the
next version of AppleWorks
-- which could be unveiled any day now -- was aiming for
"[f]ull compatibility with Microsoft Office." Since
compatibility is one of the few reasons anyone would shell out for
the cumbersome Office, the ability to share files hassle-free would
amount to a huge disincentive for buying Office.

Thus, the real interest in
yesterday's announcement was not the two new PowerBook laptops, cool
though they may be. It was that Apple will soon replace Internet
Explorer as the default browser with a new browser of its own, called
Safari,
which is supposed to run three times faster than IE -- and that Apple
will also market a $99 presentation program called Keynote
that will compete directly with Microsoft's ubiquitous PowerPoint,
one of Office's components.

Will it work? San Jose Mercury
News technology columnist Dan
Gillmor is skeptical but intrigued,
writing that if Apple really intends to go after Microsoft, "it means
more competition. That's healthier all around."

Apple obviously has a difficult
road. With something like five percent of the market share, it needs
to cater to the needs of customers who live in a Microsoft-dominated
world. Who cares how great Keynote might be, for example, if its
files are incompatible with those of PowerPoint? Yet unless Apple
maintains its edge as a technologically superior alternative, it
really has no reason to exist.

That's why I use Apple products,
but invest in Microsoft. I don't see any reason to rethink either
decision.

Incomparably critical. Bob
Somerby's excellent Daily
Howler site calls attention
to -- and takes issue with -- my recent item on liberal
and conservative media bias.
Somerby can't believe I said that the liberal media tend to be
moderate to conservative on economic issues, and criticizes my
"rollover attitude."

Oddly enough, he tries to sic Bill
Clinton on me, even though Clinton himself is the very embodiment of
modern liberalism, which isn't all that liberal except on cultural
issues. Clinton managed the economy like an Eisenhower Republican,
and signed a welfare-reform bill that only a conservative could
love.

Somerby approvingly quotes Clinton
as saying, "They have an increasingly right-wing and bellicose
conservative press. And we have an increasingly docile
establishment press." Clinton is right. But his successful
repositioning of liberalism is one of the prime reasons for
that.

Perhaps George W. Bush, by managing
the economy like a right-wing extremist rather than an Eisenhower
Republican, will help change that. He's starting to make Clinton's
cautious centrism look like liberal activism.

Tuesday, January 07, 2003

Farewell to David Shribman.
Before David
Shribman came to the
Globe, the paper had no such thing as a nonpartisan political
essayist. In his nearly 10 years here, Shribman has perfected a
certain type of column: gracefully written, insightful, and never
mean-spirited or ideologically driven. Today's
is typical. He takes an
obvious story -- the pack of Democrats getting ready to challenge
President Bush -- and does the atypical, making smart comparisons
between now and 1992, when another pack of Democrats was getting
ready to challenge an earlier President Bush, also at a time of war
and economic uncertainty.

Unfortunately, we won't have a
chance to read Shribman much longer. Soon he'll pack up his
Pulitzer
and leave Washington to take
a new job, as editor of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He'll be missed.

Bush at Ground Zero. George
W. Bush continues to be a disaster on policy (another
tax cut for the rich?), but
he remains a master political strategist. Now he's actually given
himself a longshot but realistic chance of winning heavily Democratic
New York in 2004 by scheduling the Republican National Convention in
New York City. He'll be able to drape himself in all
the patriotic symbolism of 9/11,
while the Democrats will be partying with us here
in Boston. Hey, I love the
idea of a national convention in our hometown, but as politics it's
dumb, dumb, dumb.

Monday, January 06, 2003

The snooze on online
politics. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has
a
new report out today on the
extent to which people go online for political news. And though the
report -- with the scintillating title of "Modest Increase in
Internet Use for Campaign 2002" -- is entirely non-startling, there
is one aspect that jumps out: the most common practice reported was
visiting the websites of large, established media such as the New
York Times, CNN, and local news organizations. How ...
uninteresting.

The Pew survey did report an
increase since 2000 from 19 percent to 32 percent in "online election
news consumers" who "went most often to government and candidate
websites or sites that specialize in politics." But the overall
percentage of people who reported getting any political news
online has increased only modestly since 1998 (from 15 percent to 22
percent). The preferred source of political news for most people
remains television.

A few years ago, it looked as
though politics was going to move to the Internet in a big way. The
paradigmatic example was Politics.com,
which hired Watergate veteran Carl Bernstein to make the rounds on
its behalf during the 2000 campaign. But Politics.com began
downsizing before Election Day, although it still exists in
diminished form -- complete with a
blurb from a piece that I
wrote for the Phoenixthree
years ago calling it "the
one essential site." Sorry, but it doesn't look all that essential
these days.

The GOP's over-the-top attack on
Edwards.Phoenix editor Peter Kadzis passes along
this
link from the Republican National
Committee attacking
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards. I hold no brief for
the faux populist from North Carolina, whose icky habit of commenting
on his own regular-guyness was neatly
skewered by TNR &c.
last week. But isn't this a bit much?

About Media Log Archives

The Boston Phoenix's Media Log was launched in 2002 by the paper's then-media columnist, Dan Kennedy, who continued it until he left the paper in 2005. The Phoenix's current media columnist, Adam Reilly, is now the author of Media Log, which has since been renamed Don't Quote Me. Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, blogs at Media Nation.